A Quote by Conor Cruise O'Brien
The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.
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The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail... You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
Life has its share of fears and failures. Sometimes things fall short. Sometimes people fail us, or economies or businesses or governments fail us. But one thing in time or eternity does not fail us-the pure love of Christ.
If you run a website that doesn't have something that's terrible on it, you are not trying hard enough. You have to fail, fail, fail. You have to fail and fail miserably many times.
The main point is that I think if we want the Earth to survive and everybody to have a positive future, we have to stop thinking in terms of religions and races. We have to face that we are all on the planet Earth together, and we have to figure out how we all survive. It makes no sense if we are all driving hybrid cars, but China pumps massive amounts of CO2 in the air. If we don't start working together and find solutions - if every country thinks only in terms of, "First we, then the other nations" - then we will fail.
Consider in 1945, when the United Nations was first formed, there were something like fifty-one original member countries. Now the United Nations is made up of 193 nations, but it follows the same structure in which five nations control it. It's an anti-democratic structure.
We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.
There's no checklist of how democracies fail because they fail in different ways. Some of them fail because they break up and civil war breaks out... Often they fail because someone is elected to power who doesn't respect the rules of the democracy.
The problem with success is that you lose the capacity to fail and the capacity to surprise people. So, if I'm able to surprise myself every day, I can surprise you as well. If I enjoy someone's work and they offer me their project, I do it. So what's the point of the supposed creativity? If Mona Lisa could be made by anyone, then it wouldn't have been the most beautiful painting in the world. The knowledge that you can fail can make you come first.
Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.
The reason so many people fail to achieve success is because they fail to fail enough times.
'Fail hard, fail fast, fail often. It's the key to success.' This one I learned from experience!
We must not fail, individually, for if we fail, we fail twice - for ourselves and for those who could have been helped, if we had done our duty.
It is not in the United Nations that the Millennium Development Goals will be achieved. They have to be achieved in each of its Member States, by the joint efforts of their governments and people.
If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.
The founders of the United Nations expected that member nations would behave and vote as individuals after they had weighed the merits of an issue - rather like a great, global town meeting. The emergence of blocks and the polarization of the United Nations undermine all that this organization initially valued.
If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout.
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